The Wishing Well

She orders the Château Pétrus without looking at the wine list. Third time this week, same table, same vintage, different silk. Tonight the Prada hangs black and worth what most people clear in three months. Her collarbones catch the amber light like polished stone.

The man across from her talks about his daughter. His knuckles carry scars on the right hand, little half-moons of white tissue she spotted the first dinner. Old scars. Whoever he hit, or whatever hit him, happened in a life before cufflinks.

"She turned seven last week," he says. "I got her a pony. An actual pony." He laughs, and the laugh cracks open at the end, a sound he didn't authorize. "She wanted a goldfish."

The sommelier pours. She skips the tasting ritual. The wine coats her tongue in black earth and iron, tannin clinging like something the ground gave up slow, twelve hundred dollars a bottle and it tastes like the year her father stopped using her name. Started calling her the portfolio.

"That's wonderful," she says. She means the pony.

Bzzt.

Her phone vibrates against the table, muffled by the white linen. Her fingers curl against her thigh, nails pressing through fabric into the muscle beneath.

He watches her hand. His Patek Philippe catches the light when he sets down his fork, forty-two thousand dollars of Swiss precision strapped to a wrist that checks the time like he's being graded.

"Important?"

"Nothing's important at dinner."

Bzzt. Bzzt.

A call she won't answer. She lifts the glass and drinks, and he watches her drink, his own glass untouched.

"My ex used to do that," he says. "Ignore calls at dinner." He picks up his own glass for the first time. Drinks. Sets it back in the same wet ring. "Turned out she was ignoring her therapist."

"I'm not your ex."

"No," he says. "You're not."

The sushi arrives. Thirty pieces laid out like a gallery installation, each brushed with gold leaf because the fish stopped being enough years ago. She eats three. He eats seventeen. Ten cool between them under the gold.

He tells her about the house in Aspen. Four bedrooms, a wine cellar he stocks with Burgundy because his financial advisor told him Burgundy outperforms the S&P in downturns. He laughs again, and this time the laugh holds together, warm and whole, and the wholeness of it pulls her eyes from her plate.

He has wasabi on his lower lip.

She watches it sit there, a green smear on skin gone dry and a little chapped. Her hand moves toward her own lip to gesture, that shorthand everyone knows. Then she stops. Picks up her napkin. Folds it in half. Sets it down.

He wipes his mouth on his own. The wasabi disappears.

"Come home with me," he says.

"I can't tonight."

"Tomorrow, then."

She lifts the glass. The bottle sits empty. She never noticed him pour himself a second.

"Maybe."

He signals for the check. It arrives in a leather folio. Eighteen hundred and twelve dollars for food she rearranged on her plate and wine she drank like water. He signs without looking at the total.

She excuses herself to the bathroom. Marble and mirrors, every surface reflecting and multiplying. She sees herself repeated into infinity, a procession of identical women in identical black. The lighting costs more per fixture than a semester at a state school and makes everyone look twenty-seven. She turned thirty-four in March.

She pulls out her phone.

Three missed calls from her mother's number. Her mother never calls. Her mother's assistant calls, schedules calls, sends calendar invites for maternal contact. Her mother surfaces once a quarter, distributed with the mechanical regularity of a dividend payment.

Three calls from the personal line. The one kept in a Goyard clutch that hasn't left the nightstand since 2017.

Below the missed calls, a text. Two words: 

Call me

No period. Her mother always uses periods, punctuates text messages like closing arguments.

She pulls out the lipstick. MAC Russian Red. Reapplies with the precision she learned at thirteen, when the women around her mother started teaching her that a face is a thing you build and rebuild and maintain like property.

She presses her lips together. Studies the result in the mirror, one of her, then a hundred of her, the same assembled face receding into glass.

Tap tap tap.

Someone knocking. She opens the door and walks past whoever stands waiting.

At the table he holds her coat over his arm. At the door he touches the small of her back, two fingertips through the fabric, and she lets it happen. His hand carries heat. She feels it low on her spine, spreading.

"Goodnight, Nora."

Her name in his mouth. She lets that happen too.

Outside, the car waits. Black SUV, leather seats, a driver who keeps the partition raised without being asked.

Thunk.

The door seals. The city slides past tinted glass. A couple arguing outside a bodega, the woman's hands cutting the air while the man stares at a fixed point above her head. A dog tied to a parking meter, turning circles on its leash until the leash pulls taut.

Her phone glows in her lap. Her mother's text faces up. 

Call me

She turns it over.

The apartment: white walls, white furniture, white noise from an air purifier cycling around the clock. She kicks off the Manolos and they hit the marble.

One lands upright. The other tips on its side, red sole facing the ceiling like an open mouth.

She walks barefoot to the kitchen. Opens the refrigerator. Inside: a bottle of Fiji water, a container of high-protein Greek yogurt stamped with yesterday's date, and a jade roller on the middle shelf because a woman on a podcast said cold jade tightens skin. The refrigerator throws the brightest light in the apartment.

She closes it without taking anything.

The Le Corbusier couch accepts her weight without warmth. Cold leather passes through the silk into her spine, vertebra by vertebra.

She picks up her phone. Scrolls past the automated reminders she programs each Sunday night: Take vitamin D. Drink water. Call him back. The "him" rotates every few months. The reminder stays.

She opens her mother's text. 

Call me

The last time her mother used the personal line: November 2021. Her father had driven the Maserati through a guardrail outside Greenwich. He walked away with a hairline fracture in his wrist and a DUI his lawyers dissolved in three weeks. Her mother called at 2 AM, said five words: Your father is in trouble. Then hung up and let the assistant handle the rest.

Before that: June 2018. Her grandmother's stroke. The personal line, five words or fewer, then silence.

She sets the phone on the coffee table. Walks to the window. Presses her palm flat against the glass.

Seventeen stories below, headlights streak the grid and steam climbs from a grate in slow white columns. The restaurant glows gold on the next block. She pictures him pulling on his coat. Touching the place on his lip where the wasabi sat.

When she was nine, before the portfolio, before her name became a line item, her father took her to Rome. A hotel in Trastevere with a fountain in the courtyard, small and green with moss, coins glinting at the bottom. She asked for a coin. He patted his pockets, found none, pulled a hundred-euro note from his billfold and held it out between two fingers.

She stood at the edge holding a hundred euros over the water while tourists tossed centesimi and closed their eyes.

She threw it in. The bill didn't sink the way coins sink. It floated. Sat on the surface absorbing water, getting heavy, until it drifted under and disappeared against the dark stone bottom where no one could see it.

Her father stood behind her with his hands in his pockets. She waited for him to ask what she wished for.

He checked his watch. Told her they'd be late for dinner.

Her phone vibrates on the coffee table behind her. Its glow pulses against the window glass, a bright rectangle beside her handprint.

The screen says Mom.

Drip.

The bathroom faucet she keeps meaning to fix.

The phone rings. The screen lights up, goes dark, lights up.

She crosses the room. Her bare feet hit cold marble, the edge of the rug, cold marble again. She picks up the phone and holds it in both hands, the way she held the hundred-euro note over the water at nine years old.

The faucet drips. The air purifier hums. Seventeen stories below, a siren builds and builds, climbing through the grid.

Her thumb finds the green circle.

She brings the phone to her ear and the line opens into silence. Her mother breathes on the other side. Nora breathes into the white room.

Neither of them speaks.

The siren peaks and cuts out, and the quiet it leaves presses against the windows, fills the white apartment, settles into the space between Nora's mouth and the phone the way water settled over the hundred-euro note, slowly, heavily, until it covered everything.